Interactive Design and Value Considerations.

The French social historian, Michel de Certeau has analyzed the phenomenon of La Perruque, a corporate phenomenon in which workers use the tools of their trade for their own benefit: an office worker who writes love letters to his wife on company time, a wood-smith who makes his own furniture with the company lathe.

This use of the tools of an institution without believing in the institution that is responsible for them, is useful for thinking about how digital tools are immediately involved in the creation of attitudes in favor or against both digital technology or the topic or image that it depicts.

If it is possible to use technology without considering or embracing its own special logic and using it for anti-technological ends, then what is the value of digital tools, that some will see as oppressive or controlling and that some will see as liberating?

Digital tools. Do they change the world through the special properties of technology? Or is the medium just a carrier for ideology or technology independent values?

Some of the qualities of digital tools are: modularity, abstraction, reuse and encapsulation. Others are association, indexing or indexicality, compression of space and time, storage of information, data, algorithmic processing.

Could it be possible that there is an intricate use of the medium that is connected to specific uses of the message? In other words, what if technology is an agent of change and at the same time its very nature as a general symbol manipulation machine allows it to handle a variety of subject matters, graphics, and applications in the manner that printing did previously in the Gutenberg revolution?

What if we could use technological ideas to think about the issues, yet only where the elaboration of these issues independently of technology eventually leads to connections to technology?

technology allows thinking about the issues: biology, sociology--considering the issues leads to how they connect to technology--leads to technological ideas that are present in any set of digital tools.

Using this procedure, we sensitively position technology in our works; but what about technology independent value?

Digital tools. What do they allow one to do without explicitly reflecting on technology?

1. Showing impossibilities. Consider the Time magazine issue assessing the importance of Freud around the beginning of the digital imaging era. The Image: Freud's head, hollow and open and missing puzzle-like pieces made from his face. This image attempts an analysis of the analysis that Freud himself used at the turn of the century: a psychoanalytical one, where putting together the memories of a patient was very much like unlocking a puzzle, from both the patient's and analyst's viewpoint. Yet it is an image of Freud. Thus, it sets up the reader for a reevaluation of the psychiatrist himself, turning the method back upon its creator. What is the importance of photo realistic images that depict fantastic realities? Do users or viewers have a psychological response to realism because of its trick on perception, which is very much like the psychoanalytical techniques of Freud? Was this digital composition a suitable image for assessing Freud?

2. The mixing of people and places. This effect goes back to early composite photographers, where events are fabricated and person-to-person relations are fabricated--not as pure fiction, but as alternate readings of actual historical and philosophical figures. In John Heartfield's early montage, the Fuehrer (Hitler) is standing on top of a dead body. This image associates Nazism with death, and not benevolence or useful government. But it is a mixing of Hitler and his victims: they are depicted together in a cause-effect relationship, when in actuality Hitler probably didn't regularly see bodies of humans for which he ordered executions.

3. Comparing Multitudes. A third aspect in which technology is implicit and which designers have found ways of incorporating in content is the comparison of multiple, similar-but-different objects. An example is the photo mosaic. A portrait of a famous man or woman is made up of images from their life or contribution to public discourse. An example would be a photo mosaic of Tim Berners-Lee, a principle architect of web technology, represented by a photo mosaic of internet sites from all over the web. Multiple similar/dissimilar objects positioned for comparison also leads into diagrammatic illustrations with arrows and flow charts.

4. Diagrammatic illustration. Journalism really leads in the use of diagrammatic illustration. Of course we see it in vector animation or "Flash" web-sites, but for content in which a technology independent message is important, we turn to Journalism and news for diagrammatic illustrations. The manner in which the World Trade Center collapsed researchers of the disaster studied and then presented, and many periodicals and newspapers presented diagrammatic illustrations of the impact points of the planes on the two towers, how the steel supports that made up the buildings buckled with heat, and the routes of escape for 9/11 survivors.

Another example of diagrammatic illustration is the popularization of genetic code research. Again, in news periodicals we have abstractions of genetic structure in order to popularize the science deemed important to individuals and cultures, since it is considered to be generative and fundamental to behavior.

In the film, Jurassic Park, there is an animated illustration of the creation of dinosaur clones with DNA from fossilized amber. This is a use of simplified graphics to illustrate concepts rather than document them. The method in all diagrammatic illustration is a spatialization of components in the topic of illustration. The cartoon dinosaurs are pictured from rapidly changing vantage points and while the implements of DNA injection fly about, operating on artificial embryos. Also the constraints of time are abandoned: The dinosaurs hatch from their eggs the instance after being "cloned".

The content is the popularization of science and systems. Also, science popularization legitimates the interested parties of science, and it is used to, for better or worse, achieve credibility in the eyes of the population with control over funding.

But what about education. Why does the abandonment of constraints on time and space, a mixing of content and closeness between contents educate, inform, and legitimate? One, it gives a picture to the mind if it cannot picture the topic of the illustration itself, and two, it eliminates extra information that, if in a filmed documentary would be present as everyday life is filmed: people traveling to different places, the logistics of actually moving about in the world, according to the constraints of time and space.

These four qualities are inherent values in the use of digital technology connected with the medium, although they are used to speak of specific topics not exactly related to computers. All of our web sites have value associated with them. We make choices in putting together web sites, choices which show our preferences, likes and dislikes, and political, social, and economic positions.

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